FG demands telecoms giant MTN pay fine as deadline expires

The Federal Government said it was expecting telecoms giant MTN to meet a deadline for paying a record $3.9 billion fine which expires Thursday, despite the South African operator challenging the penalty in court.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the country’s telecoms regulator, had in October fined the firm for missing a deadline to disconnect 5.1 million unregistered SIM cards, citing security concerns in a country plagued by frequent kidnappings and an extremist Islamist insurgency Boko Haram.

It imposed a whopping $5.2 billion fine, later reduced to $3.9 billion (3.6 billion euros) following an appeal by MTN.

Oluwadamilare said the pending legal proceedings had nothing to do with the payment deadline, saying “the court case is not tantamount to extending the deadline.”

Johannesburg-based MTN declined to offer a detailed response on Thursday, but said earlier this month it would launch a legal challenge in the Federal High Court in Lagos against the fine, and expected all parties “to restrain from taking further action” until the case was concluded.

MTN disconnected the millions of unregistered subscribers in Nigeria at the end of August, it reported in its quarterly performance update in October, adding that 3.4 million of those subscribers had since been reconnected.

Nigeria’s four major phone companies have routinely been fined in the past for regulatory infractions but none has received as big a punishment as MTN.

The initial fine of $5.2 billion was more than MTN’s total sales in Nigeria in 2014 and the equivalent of about 37 percent of the group’s total revenue, according to Bloomberg News.